The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 — It’s What We’re Reading

August 3, 2015

August 2015

A monthly offering from Drexel Library’s staff about the books we’ve read.

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Clark, Christopher

Christopher Clark dives through the clouds of nineteenth and early twentieth-century great power diplomacy, placing his audience waist-deep in the social and political environment that gave way to the First World War. He begins with the ethnically charged nationalism of Serbia, navigating the complex and intertwined growth of national government and secret organizations desiring to wrest the Serb Balkans from the control of the encroaching Austro-Hungarian and receding Ottoman empires. Clark then moves through the principle social, ethnic, economic, and diplomatic underpinnings of the building tensions between the dominant European powers, their relations with the Balkans, and the mobilization for war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Clark effectively demonstrates that neither the assassins who killed the Archduke, nor the decisions to mobilize for war, were created in a vacuum, but instead were grown and built over several decades of intensifying nationalist and diplomatic jockeying for power.